


le sang de ceux qui ont péri

by candyriot



Series: so much that passed us by is forever gone [1]
Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Canonical Character Death, M/M, Post-Tribunal, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24311029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/candyriot/pseuds/candyriot
Summary: Kim needs a drink. A certain imposed distance to unlock the tension. None of these events can gain traction the way things are, with his mind spinning like a broken reel to reel tape, the two halves rotating but the ferrotape flapping uselessly on each side, disconnected...
Relationships: Titus Hardie/Kim Kitsuragi
Series: so much that passed us by is forever gone [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1797331
Comments: 15
Kudos: 43





	le sang de ceux qui ont péri

**Author's Note:**

> Enormous thanks to [coolant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolant/pseuds/coolant) and [@yurizilla](https://twitter.com/yurizilla) for their help bringing this fic together! Fandom is a team sport.
> 
> Canon:
> 
> De Paule's blow didn't give Kim a concussion. Concussions just aren't sexy.
> 
> Assume passed checks/no ridiculous story about Kim.

Kim has been in firefights before, although never as literally as watching a man cook inside his own body armor. In most of them, he’s shot to wound. While deeply troubled by Harry’s condition, a gory wound from a nock-cannon at the shoulder and a bullet through the thigh, there’s something useful in having the time to process the deadly impact of his own actions even while Harry occupies the greater part of his attention.

There are eight perforations on his record, now, where for the past four years there had been six.

Other aspects of the carnage are still coming back to him. Garte tells him four of the Hardies died. Kim remembers in a disjointed way the shouts around him, the gunfire traded by both sides, all of it a step removed from his heart pounding in his ears and the skin-searing blood soaking into his gloves as he tried fruitlessly to maintain pressure on one of Harry’s wounds while the other bled freely – a living flashback to a too-fresh memory.

He remembers killing the woman, De Paule, in a moment frozen in time, a single impression of the bullet blowing out the back of her skull. Then he had been lying on top of Harry. He dropped his gun and frantically rolled over to resume emergency care, applying tourniquets to Harry’s shoulder and leg. The others had offered him the cloth, ripped from a shirt by Titus Hardie’s bare strength.

It wasn’t until later he realized he’d taken a blow to the side of the head, and he didn’t care much about it.

By the time the bridge had been lowered and emergency personnel had been allowed across, the Hardies had already helped carry Harry upstairs to his room where Kim had already sutured him. Exhausted and covered in Harry’s blood, he’d told the EMT who came to the room to prioritize the victims on both sides who hadn’t stabilized. Garte said they didn’t survive.

He’s aware in all of it that the blonde Hardie, Glen, was a casualty of bullets intended for him. It’s happened before. God willing it won’t happen again, but God seems especially abstracted in the wake of the violence, answering him with the death of Ruud "the Killer," yet trading a life for a life.

Harry’s injuries keep Kim focused. His bandages need changing. He needs pain medication and antibiotics. He has to piss. There’s nothing unfamiliar to Kim about Harry’s body, now. For the first twenty-four hours there was nothing else impinging on his consciousness. 

Even as he processed the information Garte had given him, and eaten what Garte brought him, and wore what the cafeteria manager offered him to wear while he had his clothes cleaned, except for making a report to Harry’s precinct Kim had been sitting beside Harry, living the unconscious man’s pain. 

Now that Kim has slept, having watched Garte clean the room while he sat in some degree of shock on the bed is humorous in retrospect. 

He remembers an apron had been involved, a kerchief and rubber gloves. Garte had raided the maid’s cabinet and diligently played the role, applying himself to the disaster area with great determination while keeping up conversation — though besides the casualty report Kim can’t much remember about what. He thinks he shared unimportant life details he otherwise wouldn’t have. But then, Garte had been in a yellow kerchief and nothing quite seemed real.

Now he’s slept, if restlessly, waking up to check on Harry in the middle of it. He can no longer justify just sitting in Harry’s room. First, after showering, there was a report of the massacre to write up. Report finished, it doesn’t seem like a particularly healthy choice when it means picking through the same events over and over again interrogating himself on how he could have prevented the absolute disaster of seven people dead or dying on the Martinaise pavement. 

He needs a drink. A certain imposed distance to unlock the tension. None of these events can gain traction the way things are, with his mind spinning like a broken reel to reel tape, the two halves rotating but the ferrotape flapping uselessly on each side, disconnected.

Going downstairs means getting his holster and jacket on. Besides being determined not to lose his gun like Harry, he’s not positive they’re all out of danger and he’d feel naked without it.

Dressed, he checks on Harry one more time before taking his self-enforced break.

\----

Titus Hardie is sitting on a table in the Whirling-in-Rags’ Union box nursing an 8% beer, late afternoon sunlight angling through the window, when he hears the native Revacholian accent of the smaller of the two RCM officers in the low murmur of activity outside the box. He casts a look at Eugene and Alain, both drinking. Eugene’s been on the same warm beer for an hour, maybe more, just sipping it when he remembers it.

He looks down the Whirling at the officer he’s pegged in his head as "the little guy." 

The little guy, it turns out, blew half a merc’s face off with a steady hand and executed another merc with his second shot. He has nothing but a bruise to show for it. Titus can see it ugly and purple on the side of his face.

None of it, not the little guy’s efficient killing nor the crazy cop’s firebomb nor the two of them actually putting themselves in between the mercenaries and the Hardies, squares up with his image of the RCM. They aren’t rental mobsters working for the Moralintern or they wouldn’t have gotten involved, and they aren’t costumed pussies out there catching gangster’s bullets, either – two images that used to reconcile as far as he saw the Moralintern as rich and toothless.

He nods in acknowledgement as the little guy— the RCM officer glances down the plaza at him, raising his beer to tap the air for emphasis. _Good work._

As his eyes fix on his lowered beer, he takes another drink. For now, he's still watching it from a distance, but he can’t get any of it out of his head: not the sound of gunfire, not the shouts, not the smell of gunpowder and roasting flesh, not Angie and Theo and Shanky gunned down, but most of all not Glen limp on his back with his arms splayed out, two gory holes in his chest and his blood a dark lake beneath him trickling in rivulets between the courtyard tiles and seeping into the snow, eating away at it with its fading heat.

And then there’s knowing that that fucking bitch left them to her lover’s pals to be slaughtered like pigs like the Hardies never risked their necks to protect her. But if he starts thinking about that…

He leaves off staring at his beer and goes back to watching the officer at the bar. Garte’s serving him a drink, now, something clear in a highball glass with bright green slices of lime. Gin and tonic. Maybe Titus preferred Sylvie, but Garte’s attitude’s done a 180 since the shootout. He’s there mixing drinks without looking like he wants to kill the clientele.

Titus knows coppo loco is alive and on the mend because Garte’s been up to his room, playing maid. The fact his partner’s down here looks like even better news. The man – what is he, a few years older than Titus? not older by much – seems unperturbed. There’d be some perturbation if the cop-prophet had died on him, and this is the first time Titus has seen him downstairs.

The RCM officer looks down the plaza at him, again, his brow creased with curiosity. 

At this point Titus may have been staring for going on two or three minutes. 

He’s not especially tipsy. In fact, the brooding has been slowing down his drinking, just not to Eugene’s sluggish pace. He knows the drill. He's done this before. Once the dam breaks, the drinking won't stop. But the shock hasn't worn off, yet. 

If maybe every thought takes a little longer to get through, he just needs time to square up with his new reality – including who exactly this RCM officer really is.

His shoulders twitch in a blink-and-you-miss-it, nonchalant shrug as he holds the man’s gaze. It’s his turf, and he’s comfortable laying his eyes wherever he wants.

Is that a flinch? No—the officer’s squinting his left eye, like he’s sizing him up, and it doesn’t look like it has anything to do with the pain of the bruise.

Titus isn’t sure what exactly the guy is looking for and continues watching the man with the same steady interest until the officer tilts his head a little to the side and something changes in the way he’s appraising him, like he’s actively looking for something from him, gaze flickering from Titus’ eyes the long way down his body which is when Titus gets it. Glenny. Ruby. And this guy, too.

He’s gotta grin. He remembers the first time, with Glen, a long time after they’d negotiated the initial terms of their friendship – difficult enough, as angry as Glen always was. He remembers most of it. He'd been lonely, had his heart broken. He'd been tanked. Glen didn’t want to fuck up their friendship, and Glen didn’t not want him, physically. The second one won.

Glen wasn’t a jealous kind of guy, or the romantic kind, either. Who cared how many women he fucked? Not Glen. It was easy, once they kicked it off, to end up fooling around without making it their whole lives, or even half their friendship.

Since the invitation is open, he eyes the officer in turn. Reminds him of Glen in that puffed up jacket, exaggerating his size, but there’s less of him underneath it. There’s a knife-hard edge to the leanness of him, but Titus could hold both his wrists in one hand. Without the gun, it’d be easy to bully him around, just by being twice his size. Glen had been cagey about ass stuff, even when he wanted it, but Titus has done anal all kinds of otherwise, with his women, and has a good idea how it’d feel being up in this guy’s slim little hips. Just the idea has him—

Still staring, way too long to play it off like he’s not interested in the goods.

It’s worth it just for the look on the RCM officer’s face, one of astonishment. And, okay, those effete local homo-sexuals may hook up here, sometimes – they have their own thing going – but a whole zero people besides the surprised officer would expect him to be sizing up the real estate on anything without tits. Glen, especially, would have been stunned to see it. Alain’s double-taking right now at the corner of his eye, as bad a line of sight as Al has on the bar.

Maybe that’s what does it. The thought Al, like all of them, knew Glen got dick and Al would have been just as shocked to see Glen checking out the ass of a guy on their own home turf as he is to see it from Titus. 

Glen’s never getting dick from anybody, again. Not anywhere. But he should have been able to move between crowds here, where they’d been drinking for six damn years. 

The idea that his crazy best friend, bold in every other way, died uncomfortable in his own skin has him feeling some kind of way. 

He’s thirty-nine years old, he’d call himself late to the game, but damn if Titus Hardie can’t make a play for whoever he wants at his home bar.

\----

Kim first met Titus Hardie under the impression that any interview with the smart-talking man could turn violent. That pregnant violence had come close to bearing out more times than he cared for when once would have been too much. On the other hand, aside from one intervention by Elizabeth Beaufort, the person keeping the Hardie boys’ violence in check had been Titus, however loud and angry the man got, himself.

His feelings on the man have gone through so many changes in only a few days’ time that maybe it shouldn’t have floored him to be cruised by him, but here he sits at the bar of the Whirling-in-Rags with his stomach turning over with startlement and aroused curiosity as the broad-shouldered jock ambles over.

The place, the timing, only one piece of it of it makes sense to him. 

Under ordinary circumstances, Kim wouldn’t entertain a man coming on to him while on assignment. Under ordinary circumstances, he can’t imagine Titus coming on to man in his public life. But these are far from ordinary circumstances, here in Martinaise with no RCM oversight where, today, they’re heroes. However bloody and miserable the reality of it is, to the rest of Martinaise they can do no wrong.

He lets his initial astonishment fade into calm and calculated appraisal. 

Titus has an attractively easy way about him for a man who, in his position, might have been harder and more violent. He has a big frame with muscle to spare without looking like he built himself up for show. Titus has been sculpted by hard labor with the Union and recreational sports. He's shown exceptional loyalty even to those who might not deserve it, testing and pressuring both Kim and Harry before ever aiding their investigation.

Kim has a complete list of his many and varied shortcomings detailed in his case notes. Annotated, too.

But coping with the memories and taking care of Harry has been so much more mentally than physically exhausting that Kim could stand to be cruised, even if he declines an encounter.

He sits back as Titus sidles up to his wood-backed bar stool, adopting a poised, potentially receptive and potentially judgmental position, playing his cards close to his chest.

Titus smiles undeterred in a comfortable way like worn-in denim. He smells like pilsner, but he has clear eyes. 

He's probably emotionally numb. But so is Kim.

"You look like you need to relax, and I know a little more about helping men relax than people around here might know."

The rest of the pieces come together. Kim remembers Titus looking to the wild-looking, macho blonde when he stated his open-door policy to homo-sexuals. The same man who died on impact.

"Yes, you..." Kim pauses, lowering his voice with a touch of personal concern. "Are you sure?"

Smile unfaltering, Titus raises his brow. Leaning sidelong on the bar, he makes a long, slow survey of the Whirling, nodding to those people who trade eye contact.

Calm and confident, he returns all his focus to Kim.

"So sure, I’m willing to let everybody in here see you shoot me down. That’s pretty fucking committed, isn’t it?"

As cool as he plays it on the surface, Kim’s stomach answers with another pleasant twist.

"Khm. When you put it that way."

Titus locks up Kim’s gaze in his own.

"I wanna take you upstairs and rail you like you’ve never been railed in your life."

There’s something hard and blunt and honest about his Vespertine accent that makes it sound like he could.

Kim tries to demure, sliding his gaze away from Titus’ toward his drink, except a gleam catches his eye: Garte, in front of him, drying a glass. 

Neither one of them knows what to do as their eyes meet. They’re too close to blow each other off as strangers and not close enough to laugh it off as friends.

They end up clearing their throats after an increasingly awkward pause, Garte refocusing on polishing the glass to a shine and Kim rallying himself to sip his gin and tonic with appropriate deliberation.

"Yes. Thank you, Titus. Now I remember why I was desperate to get out of bartending," Garte says dryly.

"Ignore him," Titus says, not even looking Garte’s way. 

Kim has to admit the attention is flattering.

Unwilling to be seen as _too_ stiff backed as a party to this particular game, he allows himself a smile at his own expense.

"My apologies. I’m not used to being in public."

The big man leaning on the bar beside him's grin widens.

"I’ve never done this in my life and look at me."

The flush Kim feels under that attention is entirely in his cock. 

Outsized, overconfident jocks usually fall outside his purview – except he admitted his own fascination when he allowed the man to step up to the bar.

"A one hundred percent success rate _is_ impressive."

The mood between them changes, Titus suddenly more intent and Kim breathing him in with new curiosity. It hits them both as a jolt. For a moment Kim is as unable to look away from Titus as he was from Garte for the different, more pleasurable reason he wants to taste the man’s skin.

He nonetheless remains still when Titus moves incrementally forward, only raising his brow.

"You’re not gonna let me kiss you..."

"...until you get me upstairs. No."

Still, Kim smiles again as he returns to his drink.

Better for both Titus and the reputation of the RCM that no one makes out at the bar. But the Hardies’ leader commits to everything he takes up with admirable tenacity and fuck-all attitude.

Titus has been cleared as a suspect in what’s left of the investigation. What’s more, man to man Kim accepts him as a fellow peace officer.

If Titus needs to transgress to feel close to his dead friend, Kim came down to step away from endlessly reviewing notes on a recalcitrant case and over a day of changing Harry’s bandages and playing nurse to his physical needs. He can stand to be impressed upon.

\----

He found his in with the RCM officer, but Titus sees he can’t rest easy, assuming he’ll be a fast lay. Something about this guy says he’s seen Titus’ type before and could write him off with a change in mood.

Titus catches Garte’s eye and nods to the gin on the counter.

"Garte. Sell me that bottle. I’m on the clock, here."

"Fine. Fine, I’ll put it on the tab."

"And gimme a couple glasses. I’m not an animal."

"This is the first I’ve heard about it."

The bottle and the glasses hit the counter, glass on wood, but the officer still has his gin and tonic and looks in no hurry to finish it off.

 _The balls on this guy,_ Titus thinks. He remembers the officer’s hand on his gun as the crazy cop bullied Fat Angus. Sometimes it’s the quiet ones.

He accepts they’ll go upstairs when the man allows it and he’ll get nowhere by acting impatient.

Titus moves the next bar stool down to the side. He turns around and leans back, hitching his elbows on the bar so he can look his date in the face.

He has to wonder.

"You and the can-opener..."

The man shakes his head.

"No. Actually, I only met him Monday morning."

"That so?" It seems hard to believe, but the officer has no reason to lie. "You guys got some chemistry. I figured you’d been working together for a while, 'maybe you came to scrape him off the pavement after that bender."

Glasses — Titus decides to call him Glasses — answers with a small, polite smile over his gin and tonic.

"We’re from two different precincts. The 57th and 41st combined resources for this investigation. Once we’ve closed the case, we’ll go our separate ways."

A given, maybe, Titus thinks, but it doesn’t sound written in stone. 

"In my experience you go through something this intense with somebody you tend to stick around them."

A shadow passes over Glasses’ expression. He softens, just a little, and takes two sips from his drink as he thinks, drinking it down to the ice.

"I guess it’s too early to know. Especially considering the case remains open while he’s upstairs completely unconscious."

Titus can’t help but shift restlessly eyeing that empty glass, his cock getting ideas. Laying low meant heading into Jamrock, and a week off the job meant sex, but he wants this guy. It feels like he hasn’t gotten laid in a month.

"I owe that man my life, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about him, but right now that happens to be real convenient."

Glasses lays his gloved fingertips on the edge of the bar, looking from his empty highball glass to Titus.

"I seem to be finished with my drink."

Titus catches on. He showed how much he wanted it and now he’s at a disadvantage. His competitive instinct kicks up. He can play this game, and, eventually, he’ll win it, because he knows Glasses wants a big dick in that tight little ass and Titus can deliver on what he promised.

\----

Something changed when Kim saw the whole mountain of Titus Hardie’s body squirm against the bar with undisguised desire, another jolt down Kim’s spine, hungrier and more predatory. In his professional life, he doesn’t like to think of himself as someone who enjoys the exercise of power, despite bleeding pride over the tuning of his motor carriage. Privately, he knows he enjoys it. A quiet secret he carefully keeps from himself, expressed at its most animal every month Tip Top comes tearing through the interisolary sports scene, leaving twisted metal and dead drivers and one victor in its wake.

He has control, here, as long as he plays things with a light touch, and he wants to take time to enjoy it. The gin and tonic has set to work, smoothing the way.

As he and Titus reach the balcony of the Whirling, he realizes there is a single order of business he can’t leave unaddressed if he wants to set his professional life aside.

He pauses before they reach his door, turning to lounge against the hostel wall, arms folded with confident defiance. A lift of his chin. 

He has to make things explicit.

"I don’t accept your _theoretical_ stance on narcotics."

Titus scoffs, no offense taken. Posturing aside, he’s a smart man. Kim feels right to trust he knows where this is coming from.

"We told you," the bigger man repeats patiently. "What we’re doing saves lives. No more deaths in the street over what corner a kid’s allowed to stand on. People like Alain and Ruby have somewhere to run to where they won’t get capped for escaping the besmertie life. It’s a clean business. Theoretically speaking. If that pushes the violence into Jamrock, the Union’s got no manpower there."

"I understand you believe that. Maybe it’s even true. But I want to be clear. If Evart starts shipping in chemical compounds in bulk, it may become the 57th precinct’s business. My business. I take my work with the RCM seriously."

"Sent and received, coppo. I can’t buy you off with my dick."

It doesn’t deflate Titus’ mood, that lopsided smile redoubling. He just raises the empty glasses indicatively. Pleasure on offer.

With an amused smile, and determined to leave the politics of the Débardeurs' Union on the balcony – it's not even as if _Harry_ entirely disapproves of the economic and political shape of thing – Kim pushes off the wall and unlocks his door. 

Inside the room together, with Titus setting glasses and bottle down on the desk beside the neat stack of Kim’s notes and file and opening the bottle to pour, Kim makes a gut feeling choice, both certain he hasn’t exhausted Titus’ patience and that he hasn’t unbalanced the solidarity surviving the tribunal together seems to have established.

"I have to check on Harry."

It means leaving Titus alone with his belongings, if only for a minute. He just checked on Harry before going downstairs, but the concern tense beneath his skin has been a constant since the firefight. 

They aren’t in a Dick Mullen novel. Titus isn’t a spy. The man wants something he won’t get if he rifles through Kim’s things.

"Really blue balling me, here," Titus teases, but he sets the bottle down and steps back, crossing his arms and assuming a patient posture.

Kim needn’t have worried. Harry is deep asleep, pale with blood loss and pain but breathing evenly. He spends a minute watching him, reassuring himself of the reality of the man and the fact that he’s healing.

He finds Titus surveying his bedroom in the same stance as when he left him.

\----

Glasses comes back through the door to the can-opener’s room with sharpened focus, his brown eyes intent on Titus in a way that gets his dick hot and prickles up his spine.

If the man needed to square a few things away in order to let himself have some R&R, Titus can work with that. It has him off balance, but not in a way he hates. It has him curious.

Surprised realization crosses Glasses’ brow. 

"I hope you have condoms."

Not a part of the game he’s been playing, but a good sign that his brain is finally tuned to sex.

"Always carry a couple in my wallet," Titus says, digging the old leather billfold out to wag in the air indicatively. He tosses it on the desk. "Am I gonna have to dig up some lube?"

God, he hopes not.

The officer sets him at ease with the warm and relaxed smile of someone glad to see a situation coming together. Titus feels his mood brightening, anticipation spreading through his chest.

"I consider that less inappropriate to pack. It’s one thing to masturbate on assignment…"

"And another to get dicked. I’m a lucky exception."

That smile smooths to one of cool superiority.

"In more ways than one. I almost always do the dicking."

Titus’ chest constricts at the same time white hot arousal streaks through his cock as Glasses’ eyes fall appraisingly lower. In a lifetime of friendship and wild as he was macho, Glen never broadcast designs on his ass, but this little bastard… he’d bend Titus over in a heartbeat and nail him in the ass and he doesn’t care if Titus knows it.

It kicks up conflicting urges in Titus and a bull-headed resistance that doesn’t gain traction because he’s still sure he’ll be the one who’ll be doing the fucking. He just has to be enough to impress this stone-cold motherfucker. If he’s not that he might as well give his ass up, anyway.

An uptick in his breathing, maybe, to go with the stiffening length of his dick, but he stays steady and confident. 

He pushes his belt through its buckle and hauls back on it, popping the prong, a flash of teeth in his grin that brings Glasses’ gaze back where he wants it, eye to eye.

"Believe me, I’m packing what you want."

The unflinching officer calls his bluff like a seasoned gambler, voice smooth as ice.

"Show me."

If Titus risked humiliation in the bar, this must be a hundred times riskier. He adjusts himself through his pants. He’s not a performance anxiety guy. Barring heroic quantities of beer and drugs, he can get it up. He’s not afraid to mix some sidenafil in there if he’s going all night – he’ll be forty in two months. There’s just something about the _idea_ of another guy seeing his cock out and saying thanks, he’ll pass that stings worse than the occasional possibility of disappointing a woman. 

Guys are supposed to have each other’s backs.

But this is the time for a physical, not some kind of philosophical argument and he thinks he’s got a damn strong case.

He pulls his belt through the loops of his jeans and lets it fall, popping the button and dragging the zipper down over his bulk. 

No underwear to impede him, he hitches his thumbs into the open waistband and drags the denim down his narrow hips until his cock swings free, already heavy half erect.

He sees Glasses’ gaze shift behind the glasses from careless waiting to focused interest, his inhalation visible in the flare of his nostrils, although not audible. 

A rush of pride courses through Titus, like it matters that he’s got a gay hook up hot for his dick any way different than all the women he’s impressed. It matters, but he doesn’t need or care to look at that any closer than he already has, right now.

"You want a ride on this. Don’t start playing hard to get."

Glasses looks up at him sly and flirty — pretty damn smug for somebody looking to take a dick up their ass.

"Alright," he articulates carefully. Titus feels like he’s being _handled_ , but it’s more exciting than insulting for Glasses not to concede. The smaller man glances down again and then the long way from his cock back to his eyes. "You should get that hard."

He really could drive Titus insane if Titus gave him that chance, but the longshoreman isn’t taking it. He confidently steps in, getting a hand on his own dick to hold it to his stomach, out of the way. He leans down and kisses Glasses the way he wanted to in the bar, eager and demanding, his hand in the man’s short hair.

The slighter man still tastes like gin. He’s a firm, confident kisser and immediately gets a hold of Titus’ vest to haul himself up and meet him as an equal. 

Physically acknowledging that mutual attraction does them good. Titus gives himself a stroke, feeling the blood flowing into his dick, getting him harder. Glasses kisses him in a filthy way that’s teeth and tongue and says he’s down for anything. Titus matches him in kind, escalating the aggression until he hears a satisfied hum of approval.

He wonders where a guy like this usually goes to get off. There are some mysteries committed heterosexuals maybe aren’t meant to know. A guy now and then isn’t a lifestyle.

But Titus knows what he wants, right now — what’ll get him hard.

He parts ways with those skilled lips to meet the man’s eyes up close.

"Get naked for me."

\----

Titus’ words coil warm inside Kim as he steps away from the larger man with kiss bruised lips.

He’d betray his cool to fixate on the cock on Titus just because he took it out of his jeans, but he inwardly appreciates the man delivering. 

The problem with anal sex isn’t that Kim doesn’t enjoy it well enough if there’s nothing else going. It’s that apart from emotive sex with boyfriends it bores him. He likes to be in control, setting the pace and drawing pleasure out of his lovers with the same skill and precision he brings to handling the electro-magnetic controls of his Kineema. 

Some twenty centimeters or more of cock is inherently interesting. It suggests that unless Titus is truly bad at sex — and for all the machismo from the skilled way he kisses Kim has no reason to believe that — then the man has had to be adaptive to accommodate his lovers. A novelty isn’t necessarily an advantage. Especially in this case when carelessness can cause encounter-ending pain.

He's undressed countless times with countless men. Not some monumental number, not like some men, but leaving his district for Jamrock’s Red Zone dressed as a different man with specific casual interests has left a trail of anonymous lovers. The relationships he’s tried to have were each eventually lost to his private reserve or surrendered to the job. 

Few of those men, none of those boyfriends, bore much semblance to Titus. Partly on account of taste and partly because there are only so many men this much larger than life, from size to personality, to be had. 

When Kim thinks of accommodating Titus, he thinks of Klaasje, slender and petite. Not with the perception of being feminized, if Titus ever imagined that he’s already been thoroughly disabused, but he saw Titus’ eyes working his body out under his clothes before he approached the bar and he has an idea that the big man enjoys asserting his size.

Shrugging his jacket off his shoulders and reaching back to peel it from each arm, Kim reveals his slight, compact frame, the muscles of his arms taut but underdeveloped compared to the tall longshoreman’s density. 

The shoulder holster strapped tight to his body and the gun hanging close to his side make him dangerous. But as quick as he is, and as reasonably strong for his size, he’ll be unusually vulnerable without it.

He unbuckles it, slinging it off his back, and sets the pistol on top of the low dresser beside the desk.

He holds out his hand, then, and Titus stops stroking himself to shed his own vest. He removes his holster with its high caliber Ister 50 and passes it to Kim without comment, like nothing’s happening at all. The pair of firearms rest together, momentarily relieved of their duty.

Kim lets his fingers curl under the hem of his low v-neck, then strips it off over his head. His upper body continues from his arms firm and lean with light chest hair between his angular pectorals. He wears damage from his years in the RCM, but nothing egregious. For the majority of his tenure, his job hadn’t been the most dangerous.

He lifts one foot to pull off a paratrooper boot and sock, then lifts the other, aware of the eyes on him and the sound of Titus stroking himself hard, the dry slide of skin on skin. He isn’t putting on a strip tease, only removing his clothes with brisk efficiency. He feels exposed enough for only that, with the recycled air on his bare skin and an imposing partner more than half clothed. The risk, playing out under trust, thrills him.

As he removes his thick leather belt and his fingers find the fastening of his flared trousers his gaze flickers over Titus indicatively. He holds the man’s eyes until he’s certain he’s understood.

He expects reciprocation, however delayed.

Briefs and trousers off, the rest of his slim, naked body goes on in kind, all flat angles except for the slight paunch of his lower belly, a sign of his age much like his high, receding hairline. 

Released, his cock bobs to attention, three quarters hard. He’s satisfied with what he has, a reasonably sized dick without ostentation. He would personally hate to lack precision. When he wants to fuck a man’s prostate, he can angle for those short strokes and when he wants to give him his length, he can satisfy him. 

At forty-three he is, by most accounts, at peace with his body. He always would have deeply preferred to be able to pack on muscle, but if that possibility ever existed it had been negated by a post-war childhood in the care of his father’s cousin with too little food for too many mouths to feed. Where he feels self-conscious in Titus’ presence, it’s because he assumed he had nevertheless maintained his fitness but has been exhausted again and again by Harry’s relentless jogging. 

"Thought I might see you blush." 

Titus tsks, shaking his head in amiable disappointment, but there’s nothing disappointed in the eyes drinking their fill of Kim’s body.

"I don’t," Kim says companionably, getting harder still watching Titus make designs on him.

The huge rock of a man concedes with a laugh, his hanging cock obediently rigid as he lets it go to strip, getting down to business with just a little more flair than Kim. 

He keeps his brown hair short under the cap, buzzed on the sides higher than Kim’s with the top kept shorter, hair that stays out of the way underneath a hard hat. It pairs well with his dark more than a day's worth of stubble. 

He has hair sweeping down his granite pectorals and dark on a strong abdomen showing the slightest touch of age. There’s dark hair on Titus’ thick forearms, too, long and smooth, and more like it down his powerful legs. 

He’s been stabbed, once, judging from a deep scar on his rib cage, and something left a mess of scar tissue on his right leg — it looks like a workplace accident. The years have left their smaller nicks and gashes, but he gives the overall impression of a formidable and healthy man, maybe more so for healing.

Kim’s body answers his nudity with enthusiasm, energized like a live wire, invisibly flushing with heat. Every breath is heavy with arousal. It feels like he shed ten years and all his exhaustion. It’s the exhilarating, temporary, illusory feeling that there’s nothing in the world hard sex won’t fix.

\----

Doesn’t blush, sure, but that sure doesn’t mean Glasses doesn’t fuck. The intensity coming off the guy has Titus half convinced he should sweep him up, throw him on the bed, and get on to fucking him.

Logistically, it doesn’t work, but just for a minute in his head he’s already cock deep in him and fucking him until he’s wrecked that icy attitude, has him moaning. 

God damn lube and condoms and the fact he can’t get on to sex that fast. Definitely not anal.

Having a feeling what he’s going to get, he still steps forward, reaching up for Glasses’ glasses with a casual, "You forgot something."

The officer brushes his hand away, but Titus wins a slight smile for pressing his luck. It was a transparent excuse to get closer.

"The glasses stay on. I’m farsighted. I wouldn’t be able to see you."

Titus touches the man on the hip, hand so big he can spread his fingers over that flat little ass while he tucks his thumb under the jut of his hipbone, right under his belly. He lets Glasses steady himself against his body while he runs that hand firm up his side, enjoying the smooth skin gliding under his palm. He thumbs a circle around one dark nipple, feeling it pucker under his touch. He can smell the aftershave off him, citrusy and spicy, nothing like his dates’ usual perfume or the raw scent of Glen’s body, but arresting.

His other hand drops to engulf the man’s cock. Glasses doesn’t make a sound but his lips part and that’s something. He catches his breath and stays breathy as Titus gives him a few strong, smooth pulls.

That’s a lot more like it. 

Pleased with himself, Titus slips back real casual and turns his attention to the gin. He’d say he’s sober, now, except he’s not sober at all, buzzing on arousal. He doesn’t have any hang-ups that demand he get intoxicated to fuck — Titus just likes a party — but these aren’t ordinary circumstances and they both need some backup on hand to keep their heads muddled if things get too real.

He pours three fingers of gin into each glass, pauses, and then makes it four, eyeing Glasses’ lean little body the whole time. 

"You’re a difficult guy to get a read on," he says, conversational, offering out the glass and taking a sip from his own. He means it as a compliment. This guy may have let his buddy lead the interrogation but some of the shots he got in fucked with him pretty hard.

The officer accepts the glass and sips from it, not too much. Titus assumes he knows he’s not trying to get him drunk even as it takes another sip from his own glass for the bitter taste of gin to keep away the reasons why.

"We all play our roles."

A smile plays on Titus’ lips.

"You remember the one you signed up for?"

Something glitters in the dark eyes cool on his.

"Remind me."

Titus takes the glass from his hand and, moving to the side of the bed, sets it at the end of the dresser, next to the bed, and his own glass beside it atop the radio.

Done flirting, he prompts him:

"Lube."

It turns out Glasses was keeping it in the chest of drawers by the door. A short walk across the room, but it lets Titus watch the trim muscle of his ass in motion. He trails his fingertips up his cock impatiently. A shiver runs up his back at the thought of getting inside.

He holds out his hand for the bottle, heat pulsing through his cock in anticipation. His voice is getting thicker, deeper.

"Hands and knees. On the bed."

He knows how to give orders he expects to be obeyed. To his pleasure, Glasses relinquishes control with a silent exhalation, relaxing into his role as he crawls, lithe muscle, onto the bed, hands and knees sinking into the comforter. It’ll give him something to ball his fists in.

Now he’s ass out, on display. That’s a type of power by itself. It sure as hell has Titus hooked. He reaches back and takes a small last sip of gin before stepping up behind him. Popping the bottle of lube, he spreads it generously enough over his thumb, then snaps it shut and tosses it on the bed by the man’s knee.

He parts him with both hands, taking the time to appreciate the look of the tight pucker he’s about to fuck open before pressing his thumb in to drag a slow circle around that contracted skin.

"I’m a little short on romance, seeing what it takes to get a guy to relax," he cajoles, drawing another circle before sinking his big thumb in.

The skin’s tight and hot and he presses until first the skin and then that hard, smooth ring of muscle parts around him. He’ll work his fingers in, but experience tells him it matters to get the hips relaxing, too, and under his hands Glasses’ are too tight. He slips his thumb out and massages another couple circles, drawing it out slow. He likes it when after a minute the man’s thighs relax, when his hips part that much easier. Feels like an accomplishment.

Not where he wants him at, yet, but still. Closer.

"Tell me something. They didn’t send a beat cop down here, did they? You’re part of the brass."

The officer sounds puzzled by the question but doesn’t put him off.

"You’re right. I’m a lieutenant with the RCM."

He knew it. Laughs.

"That explains the tight ass. Help me out a little. Touch yourself."

He loves the sound of his breath quickening, of the creak of the mattress as Glasses shifts his weight to get a hand on himself. He loves this guy finally letting him under his skin. Feels like he worked hard enough for it.

Titus picks the lube back up to start getting in there.

He slides in one thick finger, that muscle still tight as before, but then it never gives up easy. 

He runs a hand up his spine as he fucks him slow on his finger. That’s already feeling better. 

He may not have much in the way of an education, but he knows logistics, what it takes to maintain his kind of frontier law, his way around a gun, he has a working knowledge of drugs and he knows sex. 

Two fingers, now, real careful. He can’t change that everything about him’s a size bigger than a regular guy. He wouldn’t want to, either. He’s proud of his body, and it’s always put in work for him. But he wants his whole cock up in this tight little body and if he fucks up with Glasses' attitude there won’t be a second chance.

He has the man breathing heavy, but not making any noise. Big fucking surprise, there. The next kink to work out.

Silent or not, the guy’s unwinding. Titus moves on from just fucking him on two fingers to putting pressure on that ring of muscle to keep loosening it up, kneading his way around in a circle, another small massage, and spreading his two fingers open, sometimes, just a little. Too much pressure and that’ll be it, but just enough and he’s gotten reliable feedback it feels pretty good — feedback from more vocal partners, which would be any of them he can think of.

He likes anal, how he can tip his fingers in and feel the firm floor of his partner’s ass from that hot interior, and he does for a few brief touches. This cold bastard isn’t so cold inside.

He has some idea if he really gets his fingers in there he can make a guy squirm, but Glen hated that. He might put up with it for a minute, and Titus liked to watch it, but then he’d get real defensive, even mad and he had to back off it.

He puts the thought off before he needs to go for the gin.

"Do you know what the prostate is?" the man under his hands asks with the curiosity of someone bridging a real cultural divide.

Looks like they’re on the same page.

"I know where it is."

Right now, that seems more relevant.

"Good."

That’s permission, and Titus takes it, turning his fingers downward to caress the smoother-than-silk inner wall of the man’s body with careful pressure until he finds that fleshy swell beneath his fingers and hears a hitch of breath that makes his dick jump. He spends some time just touching him, his own breathing affected by the tremor that ripples through the man’s thighs and the way his shoulders pitch with the deep breaths he’s taking. He starts to wonder...

The memory of the bigger officer down on the pavement interrupts, and he then gets it. It’s like fucking in a church, knowing your friend is on the mend a room away.

It’s not, though, because give it a few minutes and Garte will turn up the music for the evening crowd and the crazy cop’s fine, he’s just passed out. 

Still, Titus has to make that case. He doesn’t think it’s time to make a bid, yet.

Glasses’ whole body trembles under his hand, again. The man’s _Stop_ is enough for him to back off. That shit must really be intense, but there’s immediate pleasure on offer and that’s more interesting than figuring out what’s going on with it.

One more step, an important one. He’d hate to piss this guy off. He couldn’t deal with that, today. So, when he gets three fingers lubed up he’s careful about pressing them in, even with his nails trimmed down to the cuticle. He keeps it slow and steady. And, would you know it? The water’s fine.

Better than fine. The man’s anatomy makes this easy as day, with those flat angles of his ass, no fat to spare. Just the thought he’s about to be inside him sends him.

"Damn if you don’t have the perfect ass for this. I can get in here deep."

Glasses answers with a contented hum of agreement and a nasal inhalation. The man gives his own cock a few last pulls and, hips loose and flexible, gets back on both hands to roll his hips further open and help Titus to stretch him.

The longshoreman caresses that firm ass under his whole hand in approval, smiling to himself.

"That’s more like it. I’m gonna rearrange your organs but I want you to love it."

\----

Kim doesn’t suppress his laughter, heat-flushed shoulders shaking. Maybe there’s something to be said for Titus’ brand of brash overconfidence. Just maybe, Kim has been too particular in the bedroom.

He can’t remember someone spending so much time indulging his body without already taking something in return. The fact it’s a matter of physical necessity has him no less heated nor less bonelessly relaxed. Precum drips from his cock onto the comforter from the low intensity, persistent pleasure of those big fingers massaging that sensitive knot inside him to life.

"I don’t know how you guys field this, but the sink’s right there," Titus says as he withdraws his hand from inside him, giving him a pat on the ass before letting himself into the bathroom. 

Kim knows Titus won’t get the scent off after only the first time washing his hands when he’s been three fingers deep in someone, but appreciates it's considerably more hygienic.

Kim’s glad he remembered to close the door to Harry’s room, and thinks about the fact that Titus has no doubt brought other partners up to this room before, and who knows how many – although surely they were women.

In the short minute he waits, he hears Garte turning the music up downstairs, its low vibrations penetrating through the floor and the door.

He just smiles to himself as _Who jacked the sink up?_ comes from behind the door, sitting back on his calves with a sigh of relaxation. He takes the moment to look down his body, thumb brushing his own nipple, looking at his rigid and leaking cock pressed up against the soft weight of his lower belly. 

He feels lucky to still be attracting men. 

He feels unsettled at being left alone and is relieved when Titus returns. 

The man takes a look at him as he retrieves the wallet off the desk. Kim’s composure isn’t where he’d like it to be, and he feels a phantom of shame that Titus shows a little concern as he returns to the bedside. He picks up Kim’s glass, offering it up.

"Gin?"

If Kim didn’t need it, he does, now, and he takes the glass without argument, drinking a centimeter off it as Titus drops to sit on the bed beside him, the mattress sinking with his weight. 

"Go ahead. Knock it back. You just checked on him."

With his whole body telling him to trust Titus, on however carnal and biased a basis, the flash of resentment he feels at the idea of needing to be minded doesn’t end the night. He drains another few centimeters off the generous amount of gin, shivering as he lowers the glass. He passes it back to be set on the bedside. 

He realizes, then, meeting Titus’ eyes, that he’s not being minded or pitied. There’s pain there. Kim remembers the stubborn, angry way this giant man tried to defend the deceased, youngest Hardie boy, Angus, from their interrogation and has a fragment of an idea that Titus needs an outlet to fortify himself against his failures in the same way Kim has been meaningfully distracted with Harry.

He lets him kiss him. 

It’s easier, now, with both of them on the bed, even though the larger man still has to lean down to him. There’s less teeth but it’s still heavy and hungry, still aggressive — their two bodies ready to fuck. 

Kim wants to offer some kind of acknowledgement as their lips part.

Wills himself.

His gaze slants away. 

A fierce, unidentifiable emotion flashes through him. 

He can’t. 

The gin is creeping into his bloodstream chasing away the strictures of a personal rulebook and the threat of future investigations, but he has nothing to give. Parceling himself out isn’t in his nature.

And still the gin can’t keep back thoughts of his partner, Eyes — Dominique, the bullet wound and the funeral and his ledger of Dom’s unfinished cases and scrubbing Harry’s dried blood, caked brown, off himself, scouring his skin until it’s left bright red.

He can’t put words to his emotions, but he seizes hold of Titus, then, and, deliberately, he kisses him, wearing his pain and willing the man to wrest these thoughts out of his head, hoping he’s someone Titus can pour his own grief into. 

God, he’s huge, leaning in and wrapping Kim up, taking control of his whole body. It’s being bullied in the best way, having to surrender to the easy strength in those granite muscles, easing certain difficult memories of loud jocks from his youth. It works, having no power over himself, feverish thoughts spilling away as the alcohol and the masculine scent off Titus does its work until he’s nothing but relaxed and aroused.

They break apart. Maybe he demanded too much from the longshoreman, because Titus snags his own glass and drains it. At his size it will have half the impact. But then Titus is grinning, again, with his other arm still looped around Kim.

"And now I’m gonna slick up and fuck you in the ass. Let’s see how long this quiet guy routine holds up."

"As long as I want it to," Kim says.

"But you don’t want it to."

Kim makes a face as Titus extricates himself, murmuring a coming-on-tipsy _Fuck_ beneath his breath.

Liquid from the way the bigger man worked the tension from his body and from the gin, Kim lowers himself back to his hands and knees. 

The first time, it felt relatively routine. With no special insecurities about bottoming, by itself, the question had been if he’d regret letting Titus put his fingers in him, a thoroughly practical concern impinged on only by the faint excitement of acceding to the man’s commands.

Now, it seems more intimate. Ridiculously so for someone facing a wall. He’s been touched so thoroughly, those strong hands so persuasive on his body, that he wants to repay Titus in kind. That means Titus massive inside him, and deep, and Kim making his own effort to satisfy him. 

Kim’s physical curiosity remains, while no longer singularly thinking of himself.

He hears a condom tearing open behind him and the barely audible sound of rubber unrolling over skin, muted against the music from below them. The familiar wet sound of a generous amount of lubricant slicking over rubber has Kim subtly shifting his weight from knee to knee, opening his body wider.

"If I could see my cum dripping out that ass..."

Kim puts him off with a dismissive scoff, despite the warmth curling in his stomach. 

It’s a waste to take a man that deep inside and not let him leave himself, some animal part of him agrees.

Now Titus touches him on the hip. Next he feels the blunt head of his cock pressed to the entrance of his body. A deep exhalation from the man behind him and then he pushes in, Kim bracing his hands against the mattress 

As big as he looked, he feels bigger, the stretch of him tremendous. It’s a sensation spreading like fire in his nerves, more rewarding for being painless, the lube cool and slippery on Kim’s skin and Titus’ heat underlying it. Kim’s breath still hitches. He still has to open his hips wider yet to take him, spread his knees further. 

Titus must have only slipped in an inch past the thick bulge of his head — impossible to gauge when everything gets lost in the intensity of sensation and when Kim hasn’t made time for this particular pleasure in several years — but only some inches inside him Titus pulls back, Kim dragging the comforter beneath him into his fists at that somersault sensation, like being turned inside out.

Kim chokes on a moan he can’t let out. Just like that the man’s enormous hands are both on his body, gentle, pulling him back as Titus slides himself deeper in and caressing, too. Strange to feel his body engulfed in that heat when it’s Titus who’s inside him.

"You can make some noise, babe, nobody here’s gonna hear you."

Good with his hands, maybe, but absolutely maddening at mouthing off, Kim thinks with a flash of indignation, tipsy enough not to assign fault. Titus is an extroverted performer. Kim isn’t. 

He wasn’t wrong. Kim wants to let out more gasps and catches of his throat. It’s an unwelcome part of himself who’s insisting it’s unbecoming, and not the place or time.

A grunt from Titus as he sinks in deeper. He fucks his way in slowly, keeping up a little in-and-out. That cock is wiping Kim’s mind blank, everything sensation. The world narrows to the impossible fullness of his body and the staggering sense of being stroked from inside at the same time he’s stretched so tight.

If he tries to think further, there’s Titus’ hands digging into his hips, holding him firm so he isn’t pushed forward by the force of the man’s thrusts. The fact the longshoreman hasn’t even started taking his pleasure from him imposes itself on Kim. He imagines the stone force of those hands when Titus begins fucking through him.

A louder, wetter catch of his throat.

Titus zeros in on it, drags himself all the way out just to push his way in again: a streak of dull, heatless flame as the bulge of his cock’s head pulls on Kim from within, the briefest emptiness, and then the head and the length of him filling Kim’s unresisting body back up again.

It’s in his mind that something finally gives way. A low moan groans from his throat, making the tips of his ears hot.

"Yeah?" Titus says. "Wait until you take the whole thing."

The same teasing tone, but unmistakable praise. The man inside him’s smooth talking voice is rough and deep with arousal.

With Kim loose for the taking Titus stops drawing it out, working deeper with smooth thrusts until he’s up against Kim’s ass with a sigh of relief. He snaps his hips to give it a smack, body to body.

Kim listens to his own greedy moan at the force behind those hips, all anticipation. And then Titus lays into him.

Getting fucked by Titus means his dominating hands pushing Kim forward even as Titus pulls out, Titus thrusting in at the same time he drags Kim down that boulder of a dick. Kim’s arms flex against the mattress as his body glides forward and back on the inescapable reality of Titus’ cock. There’s real power in Kim's lean arms, making it easier for the two of them to collide. He can feel Titus' balls clapping against him at the same time his cock spanks his own belly. The squelch of the lube is loud and wet.

A profound awareness overtakes him that everything inside him has been reconfigured for the singular purpose of this near-stranger’s pleasure, a thought that leaves him gasping.

"Come on, copper. Tell me how you like it."

That voice, still prodding. Still trying to bait Kim out. 

Still genuine, keeping Kim’s mind unspooling.

Kim can think of an entreaty:

"Don’t be afraid to slap me." 

" _Shit,_ " Titus says behind him. 

Kim’s short laugh trails off in a little moan at the impact of their bodies together. With Kim doing his half of the work, Titus lets his hand come off Kim’s hip to crack against his ass the next time their bodies collide. He spasms around Titus as the impact reverberates through him, choking at the fact his body gain no traction, completely at the longshoreman’s mercy. His skin stings with the tremendous strength of him, a thousand prickling pins.

Kim gives an eager, heady groan he’s inescapably embarrassed to hear. It’s Titus’ turn to laugh.

Endless furtive nights with strangers with no knowledge he’s an officer of the RCM, boyfriends he’s forever been hesitant to trust, an intense focus on precision and control – the evening can’t last, and Kim never would have found himself in this position without a bizarre week of enormous stress ending in unspeakable tragedy, but a sliver of Kim knows it shouldn’t take that and three or four shots of gin for sex to be fun.

He would immediately choose to bury the knowledge, but he’s too caught up in the physicality of it.

\----

Titus can’t wrap his head around what that sound out of the tight-laced RCM lieutenant does for him. He just feels it through his dick, base to head, while he keeps fucking into him.

Persistence paying off.

He promised to rail him. He makes good on it, thrusting hard as his touch guides Glasses down his cock, rhythm interrupted by heavy smacks to his ass cheeks, right then left, until they’re both burning red. The guy’s getting loud, Titus wringing suffering sounds of pleasure out of a throat so obviously unfamiliar to them. 

Titus is used to women, soft and pliant. He might get rowdy, but he’s stays soft enough with them and their plump asses and heavy tits and seductive smiles.

The body engulfing him in its heat is absolutely nothing like that, tonight, all muscle and bone, slight but masculine, only soft where hard years have started to weather it. 

He still has to hold back his strength, but only so much. When he’s battered that ass around to the point he doesn’t need to, he just lets his hips do the slapping. And the guy loves it, or he wouldn’t be shoving back onto him, sweat gleaming on his back and on his hard, compact biceps. He wouldn’t be moaning how he is — that icy bastard he was before could put a stop to things, even right now.

Titus just wishes he could see his face. 

He can feel his orgasm building up. He’s been willing it off for a while. No point, now, because if he wants to take the guy further, he’s not gonna hold out. He takes him in both hands, takes him over, the man’s muscles so pliant they’re really going to be sore, later. His thumbs are on his back and his fingers wrap almost to his naval.

He’s rolling into him heavy, watching his elbows start to give. The guy might shout if he wasn’t incapable, so instead the sounds out of him are obscene, choking on his own noise, again, but real loud, making these ragged gasps.

Titus grinds himself up against his ass, snaps his hips and grinds up again. He’s close, now. His own throat’s almost choked off, the way he’s breathing. He has no shame about his own grunts and growls and the low groans that come out of him.

He rolls right up against him, still holding him to his hips. He’s starting to lose it and still wonders if he can get a word out of him. Pushes him.

"Fuck, I wish you’d let me cum in you. 'Least tell me you want that."

This time the stubborn bastard takes up the challenge. It takes him two tries to grit a word out, velveted by that native accent.

"I’d let you cum in me. Inside me. Feel it running out of me..." He wouldn’t, but it’s the image on offer. " _Fuck me._ "

As good a trade as he’s gonna get, helping take him there, deeper in that fantasy. He already knows Glasses doesn’t play along for just anybody. 

He uses him hard, his whole body nothing but a place to sink his cock, letting him struggle to keep up. Those arms finally buckle. Titus’ hips stutter. He bucks up against him, whiting out with the surge of pleasure, the liquid feeling of that rush through his dick.

It’s the best damn thing he's known to have a body all but flat up against him as he comes back around to feel himself making helpless little pushes that don’t get him any deeper than he is already, bent over the man in a C shape and dripping sweat from his brow.

He’s careful pulling out, sucking in air to see the lube-glossy gape he leaves behind. They’re both breathing heavy, both sweating it off, but one of them’s real small and Titus takes it on himself to make sure Glasses has an easy time turning over on the bed, fucked out like he is. 

He’s a sight: glasses fogged up, lips parted, body flushed, shoulders slouched, his chest heaving and his cock so hard against his stomach it must hurt, leaking messy.

Titus gives him quiet to put himself together. He rolls off his condom and throws it away. He snags the towel hanging on a bar next to the bathroom door to wipe himself off. He doesn’t think Glasses wants the cum on him smeared on his bed. Cool as he’s playing it, his eyes always come back to the man sitting on the edge of the bed — both to get his fill of what he did to him and to make sure it wasn’t too much.

"My handkerchief," Glasses says in a frayed voice.

He gestures toward his pants. Titus finds it in the pocket and hands it to him. 

"Here."

The man slowly and deliberately removes his glasses, carefully using the handkerchief to wipe the fog from their lenses as he brings his breathing under control.

Titus wets his lips, just looking at him. Titus has seen just enough Seolite expats to guess he can’t be all Seolite, there’s some angular Sur-la-Clef there — nothing like Titus’ own big, blunt Vespertine face. The lines of demarcation aren’t absolute in the way Jean-Luc goddamn won’t shut up about, but a man can make some approximations.

The guy’s still got great eyes, dark eyes, striking. It seems like a shame they’re always half lost in the reflection off his glasses. Better than being blind, but still. He’s handsome enough in a sharp way. 

Titus appreciates the fact he’ll never see his whole face like this again. A shame with that bruise down the side of his face, but nothing to do about it.

He thinks about that kiss, having him all wrapped up in his body. He wants more of that. Hell, he wants to fuck him again, too, but if it happens at all that’s a ways out — both in terms of getting his dick up and in terms of what Glasses can take.

Glasses has his glasses back on, now, and Titus nods back toward the rest of the bed behind him.

"Let me get you off."

For a moment from how coolly the smaller man considers him Titus thinks he might get turned out, party over, but then he gets the nod from him so he takes the initiative to turn the covers down while he climbs in with him. 

He lies huge beside him, impressed to think about the fucking the guy just took when he’s this slim but no way in hell he’d bring that up. He’d like to keep his dick, thanks.

Glasses pushes himself up on his elbow to kiss him. Titus takes the invitation gladly, getting an arm around him to hold him there. He’s blissed out, the horror show in his head on mute, even though the gin only did a little. He’d like to keep it that way, just breath and skin.

Too early to make out, though, when his date’s dick looks painful. 

He helps Glasses lower himself back to the bed and reaches down there. He doesn’t try to finesse it because it won’t take a lot, just wraps the guy up in his hand, unsurprised when his body immediately thrusts up off the bed. Some easy give and take and, like that, he’s cumming, sticky-white and sloppy all over his stomach.

\----

Kim’s spilled out on the bed in a way new to him, so hard used that his muscles have all gone slack, his cock still aching from keeping his orgasm pent up so long despite the cum cooling on his abdomen. The sheet beneath him cools the sore cheeks of his ass. His skin is scorched from the welcome abuse.

He still feels stretched wide, and a little swollen. He knows from experience past he’ll have unusual aches, impossible to place, over the next few hours. They won’t be completely unpleasant.

"You’ll have to get the towel," he says, leaving the rest unspoken. _Because this is a mess, and I can’t get the towel._

"Really?" Titus says, slowly working something out in his head. "Because the way I figure it..."

Kim startles as the man lurches up over him on the bed, although it barely translates to a physical reaction, just a slight jerk of his legs. It’s a powerful sensation to be underneath his body, knowing what he’s already done to him. For a moment it doesn’t seem to make sense. 

Then, Titus climbs down the bed, settling over Kim’s stomach. Heat washes through Kim’s tired body to see him lowering himself to his skin, a slick tongue lapping a trail through the cum pooled on his soft stomach.

Shivers wrack Kim’s body. He can barely take in the sight of it. As much as he can crave it, cum never tastes _good_ to him, bitter with its bleach aftertaste. Is it the transgression or the chance to please motivating Titus? Or is it both? He’s compounded one and the other, himself.

He abandons himself to the hot strokes of his tongue, no longer thinking, only enjoying the reprieve. However it tastes to him, Titus is too competitive to leave a job undone, leaving Kim to drink in the lewd sight of him licking up his spend. There’s something about the size of him and the fact of his stereotypically heterosexual inclinations that excites him to have him at his pleasure.

He leaves him wet with spit, licked clean.

"God."

Titus looks up his body, brown eyes alight with humor.

"I’m actually a pretty ordinary guy."

He thinks back across the past days through the haze of sex and gin.

When he first met Titus that second morning with Harry, he could have described him as a meathead and a blunt instrument, if he was feeling unkind.

Knowing what he does about Titus' affection for Klaasje and his belief she wasn't herself insidious but was instead misled by Lely, his dogged loyalty at his own expense is retrospectively admirable, although it was Titus who was misled.

Even though Titus had his own doubts about Ruby, he refused to aid the investigation without compelling evidence, working them over like a forensics investigator – and that despite the fact his ten year tenure as sheriff of Martinaise was losing ground to her organizational acuity. Kim saw him lose his temper over it without ever compromising her.

He didn't just put on a big show while the beer was flowing. When the mercenaries came, he stood in front, trying to solve the fact of the armor knowing the odds were he'd die. It's only a quirk of probability that he isn't dead after throwing himself into the fray outside the Whirling.

"You’re not."

The big man's brow furrows.

"Don’t get sentimental. This is just..."

The first time he hasn’t finished a sentence, and with good reason. Kim understands if he tries to articulate it the memories will come flooding back. 

Titus draws himself up and lays himself down heavy beside him and Kim draws him in, kissing him long and deep, a hand on his skin caressing it with his thumb, until the man begins to relax, again, and despite the taste of Kim's own cum.

"Gin?" he says as they part, wrinkling his nose with a smile, clarifying: "The taste."

What’s left on the bedside is the dregs of his own glass, but it’s enough for Titus to reach behind himself and snag it, sipping a little and giving the rest to Kim to sip.

Glass set aside, kissing Titus again is significantly more pleasant.

He can’t say how good it feels to be held by a lover who dominated his body so completely. Kim’s not a trusting man, but it leaves him with a feeling like trust. Titus had the power and the liberty to do him injury and he restrained himself to what gratified Kim. It’s a safe and sheltered feeling that will be fleeting, but one he wants to savor.

It doesn’t equate to passivity. With their arousal spent, and no longer playing a role, Kim’s hands delight in exploring the longshoreman’s giant body. His stubble-prickled jaw, massive chest, its hair damp with sweat, the places where smooth skin stretches over carved muscle. He explores the scar on his rib cage and lets himself play with the outsized cock at rest between his legs, enjoying the big, soft head and sturdy shaft of it and the chance to feel its foreskin gliding over their intersection. 

He likes the idea of his inner walls gripping it as Titus, thrusting, drags through him, raw flesh on raw flesh — not worth the risk of venereal disease from a promiscuous partner, but appealing on every other merit.

He’s being explored just as thoroughly, all his nicks and scars being found out, those huge hands bold and dexterous. Titus caresses where he will and gathers handfuls of what he wants, all of it reminding Kim’s spent body of the reaming it took from him.

Titus breaks off from a particularly deep and vulgar kiss.

"I never got your name."

"My name?"

"Mmhmm."

Despite all the effort spent to so briefly open him up, he discovers himself intractable, again.

"It doesn’t seem important."

Titus makes a sound of disbelief but just shakes his head and presses a lingering kiss.

A thought snares Kim’s mind and jerks him to a halt. His chest clenches. It’s all blood and gore in his head. He’s caught stunned in Titus’ gaze as the man draws back. He wants the thought to pass. It won’t. From what seems like a great distance, he hears himself forming the words.

"He took the bullet meant for me."

Titus’ face shutters. It’s the least emotive Kim has seen him.

He picks his words carefully:

"They had enough bullets for all of us."

Kim begins to regain himself. It was a terrible idea on the face of it to have sex in the early stages of a trauma, but he chose to, and he did. 

He feels petty for withholding his name in the face of the facts.

"It’s—"

"Binoclard or something," Titus breaks in, no venom behind the word — he hasn’t found his smile, but he’s playing it off like a joke. "If I really need it, I can ask around."

It’s a fractured moment when Titus breaks away from him to stalk naked across the room and drink gin from the bottle, with Kim still clearing his head.

But Titus comes back, and Kim welcomes it. The man rolls on top of him, then, keeping his weight off him but crushing their mouths together. Kim grasps hold of him, matching the sudden urgency. He has the whole man moving over him, leveraging his weight to bear down against his mouth. It’s a delirious few minutes. 

Titus gets one of Kim’s wrists in his hand and pins it to the bed, boasting his strength. Kim understands how easily the bones could break, an unspoken communication that Titus wants him pliant, but – from the searching way he kisses him – not a threat. He gives himself over to the man’s struggle to regain equilibrium.

He doesn't know how long they spend that way, two writhing bodies.

Something coils in Kim. An alarm clock ringing. He tenses under Titus, who relents. So suddenly preoccupied, Kim glances off toward the bathroom door.

"About time to check on him?" Titus nods acquiescence, to himself or to Kim, extricating himself from their embrace. "I need to take a leak, anyway."

Kim’s body feels alien to him as he pushes himself off the mattress, stiff in some places and still unusually pliable in others with his mind still floating from the diminishing effects of the gin.

A touch to Kim’s side as he begins to move past Titus.

He pauses, looking to him.

"You gonna let me fuck you again?"

The visceral appeal of the idea is the only thing it has going for it. Harry needs care, the case remains open, they aren’t necessarily out of danger yet, and the undertaking would completely exhaust him. Kim can’t justify fucking until he can’t walk. 

He hesitates long enough to make the obvious obvious.

"At least you wanna say yes," Titus flirts, a grin back on his face. The definition of incorrigible, he spreads his hands. "Well, hey, the, what, end of existence your pal’s been on about all over town hasn’t showed up, yet."

Kim acknowledges to himself the fact that he and Titus work on the same asphalt. He doesn’t even know at what distance. He has no idea what specific duties Titus might perform in the harbor proper. It’s not impossible they’ll run into one another again.

However, due to their positions in Revachol West’s political landscape, actively seeking the man out would be unwise. 

"Khm."

Titus feigns affront.

"You told me you’re with the 57th. I bet you live fifteen minutes out. You telling me if you volunteer for the RCM they own your dick? You can’t get cock from me again because I’m Union?"

Kim feels he can sleep certain he’s being propositioned purely on matter of political principle, and smiles.

"If you’ll excuse me."

\----

Glasses pulls on his pants and his undershirt and takes off for the next room.

Titus takes a leak, eyeing the mangled faucet, again. It looks like somebody wrenched it shut with pliers.

The door to the other cop’s room is shut. He can’t hear anything over the music below.

He flushes the john and steps back into what’s currently Glasses’ room. The gin has set in, and he’s about to that place where he could get it up, too. 

He takes a seat at the edge of the bed, again. His date made it pretty clear they’re done, but he can’t convince himself to leave, yet.

The case will wrap up. This guy will leave town. He’ll be taking something with him: a second shot at life. He believes him. The bullets in Glen’s body were meant for him. 

Titus had been busy trying to draw a bead on the man in full armor with the nock-cannon who was aiming his gun at Glasses’ partner, same as Glasses. He hadn’t registered what happened. He heard the scream but hadn’t known Glen was breathing his last behind him, caught up in the gore of the bigger cop getting his shoulder blown up in front of him. Glasses put out the armored merc's eye and then Titus got a glance at Glen, and it looked bad, but the merc's leader, still ablaze, was already drawing his gun. The possibility they'd all die took over.

It feels like something he should have known. Some sixth sense should have told him his best friend was already dead way before he saw what was left of him laid out.

He hadn’t known, though. Not until after the mercs were down. And it hadn't fallen into place until ten minutes ago the bullets in Glen were supposed to stop Glasses from killing the Killer. From what he knew they could have been meant for Glasses' partner, or him.

It’s been real hard to piece together a timeline. It’s still hard.

He remembers coming to Martinaise from Vesper, eight years old and he hadn’t known why his life had been uprooted, just that his old man got them out in a hurry. One more person in search of refuge who found it in Martinaise. He’s still not clear on the details. Someone died. But a lot of people die. He’s killed enough of them, himself.

He had a whole new language to learn. For the first few years he really stuck with the Vespertine community, scrapping and playing rugby like back at home. He knew who Glen was, but they weren’t friends. The kid was rough and rude and violent. Might punch you in the face for no reason. Nobody got through to him.

They got to be friends in their teens, waiting to pick up shifts at the harbor as casual dock workers not even on the union radar. It meant waiting long hours just hoping to get a shift with nothing to do but stay sober and talk to the guys around you.

That’s how he got Glen talking. Talking friendly at him until, one day, the guy cracked. He’d say he has a talent.

Maybe Titus' peers around Martinaise looked up to him — physically, they had to — but he wasn’t leading but jack and shit back then. He was out there praying enough guys would drop out ahead of him or get mangled in the harbor that one day he’d become a union man and make good money for himself. 

Other kids in Martinaise were out there gang banging, getting gunned down in the street. 

That didn’t change until he changed it, and change in Martinaise grew out of those early years with him and Glen and Glen’s growing armory. 

His pops taught him to shoot a rifle, so he’d been overconfident when Glen took him across the water lock, handed him a high caliber pistol, and almost pissed himself laughing when it knocked him on his ass.

—it’s too fucking much, and it won’t stop.

His thoughts keep spooling as he waits for Glasses to get back. 

He won’t make a big deal out of it. He’s not going to get emotional in front of him. He just needs a little closure.

He hears the door to coppernado’s room open and close. There’s a minute where Glasses washes his hands, then he comes back in, stripping himself of his shirt — but it’s casual, not sexual. Even so, Titus likes all that skin.

"I need to sleep, while I can."

"Figured. That’s my cue, innit? I don’t know why I’m hanging around."

He doesn’t move from the bed, just considering him. If it’s only half for the reasons the man thinks, that’s better than being understood. He wants this image of the man burned in his mind’s eye. He needs to turn it over in private, let himself work out the fact he’s alive and Glenny’s dead.

Glasses doesn’t know what’s going on with him, but the steel of him softens to still-unbending apology.

"You hoped I’d change my mind. But, you see, I rarely change my mind."

Anger flickers in Titus. The guy’s speaking truth, but maybe he could _condescend_ to budge on this one.

"You goddamn Revacholians. Sexy accents but you’re all out to prove you don’t need anybody but yourself." The 'Revacholian hero'. What a crock. Unsatisfied, he casts around to get the last word. "Except people like Lizzy. That woman’s got _class consciousness_."

His anger vindicated. Sure, Glasses was raised like this but hell if he isn’t choosing it, too. 

He has no idea what happens next, except that the space between them disappears. The man kisses him like he’s a drink of water. There’re hands cupping his jaw, a thumb combing across the bristles of his stubble. 

He isn’t used to having his face turned up and letting someone pour themselves out on him like this. He lets his anger go. He lets himself enjoy it.

It’s a deep, quiet kiss. Then Glasses pulls away, the way the guy looks down on him totally unreadable.

"I might call you. It might be awhile."

He’s not in a position to push it, nor to turn him down. 

He can't know what he wants. He doesn't even know if he'll hold it together through the night.

"I’ll take it."


End file.
